Nice school:
Shame about the knifing.
More about music teaching:
Scientists have discovered an unusual tip for parents who want their little darlings to grow up to be musical geniuses - teach them Mandarin Chinese.Psychologists at the University of California in San Diego found that children who learnt Mandarin as babies were far more likely to have perfect pitch - the ability to name or sing a musical note at will - than those raised to speak English. Perfect pitch, though common among the great composers, is extremely rare in Europe and the US, where just one in 10,000 is thought to have the skill.
Diana Deutsch, who led the research, believes the explanation lies in the different use of tones in the two languages. While the meaning of English words does not change with tone, the same is not true for Mandarin and other tonal languages, such as Vietnamese, Thai, and other Chinese dialects.
For example, in Mandarin, the word ma has four meanings. Depending on tone, it can mean mother, horse, hemp, or be a reproach.
Interesting. Which by the way is another word that means lots of different things, depending on how you say it.
Jessica Duchen writes:
… I'm working on a piece for BBC Music Magazine's education issue comparing the merits of different types of schooling for budding musicians in Britain. I've talked to 5 musicians so far and am about to talk to another 2 or 3. So far, the following points have leapt out at me:1. Nobody under the age of 35 has yet had a good word to say about music provision in UK state schools.
2. Most of the musicians who went to a conservatoire say that they regret not having gone to university.
3. Most of the musicians who went to university said it was very, very hard to combine academic work with enough practising.
4. Private education at a good school today costs an absolute fortune, even if you win a 'music scholarship'.
I'm reaching the conclusion that what counts is really only your personal fibre. If you've got the guts and the determination, it doesn't matter where you study. All these places are getting it wrong in their own sweet ways. Self-reliance is the only possible answer.
So: all schools are rubbish, and only if you put yourself in charge of your own education have you much of a hope of doing what you want successfully, and only then in spite of whatever school fate has dealt you.
Sounds about right.
This is certainly true: that pupils who have a sincere desire to be something they are willing to tell you about are a whole hell of a lot easier to teach than the ones who, when asked, shrug their shoulders and say, whether sincerely or just because they think it's none of your damn business: "Don't know."
Here is Harry Hutton's latest Killer Fact:
Mussolini was expelled from school for knifing one of his classmates. He went on to become a primary school teacher (Mussolini, not the classmate).
Indeed he was (although I cannot verify that it was a knifing of a fellow student that broke the disciplinary camel's back) and indeed he did.
It's off topic somewhat, but I really do admire Harry Hutton's blogging a lot. It's not hard to get and to keep the attention of readers when you already are famous. His writing, it seems to me, is a model of how to use blogging to get famous, although perhaps he already is famous and I hadn't noticed. His postings are terse and to the point. No attention is presumed upon. I think my own blogging style may now be being influenced by him. If so, good.
I recently hailed Scrappleface's new book. Someone (maybe Harry Hutton himself if all others fail) should do one of Harry Hutton's best bloggings.
Harry Hutton has been a teacher for quite a long time, and many of his more penetrating postings are on educational themes.
Category: Blogging • Famous educations • The reality of teaching
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Yesterday I visited Paradise Primary again, and this time I tried something different. I dressed well. Smart suit. Smart shirt. Tie. A new pair of shoes. The idea was to make my two charges more biddable, to impress them. I remember reading, somewhere, that what determines the behaviour of boys in a classroom is not what the teacher does in the class, but what the boys perceive the teacher to do outside the class. What counts is the perceived position of the teacher in the pecking order out there in the big, wide, bad world. Dress better, and you look more important in this world, and hence to the boys. Ergo, they pay attention to you.
Whether it was coincidence or causation, the boys were more biddable. Boy One even asked me about my smart clothes. Why are you wearing such smart clothes? – he asked. Because I am doing something important, after this, I said. Not that this isn't important, I added hastily, but this other thing is, you know, really important. So how about we do some reading now, Boy One? Okay, says Boy One, and we do.
Boy Two also submitted to some reading.
I don't want to give them more informative nicknames than this, because I don't want to impose my expectations upon them, and nicknames are bound to embody expectations. The One and Two thing is strictly a matter of chronology. Boy One goes first, then Boy Two
Later, I had another look at the Volunteers' Handbook, and it seems I can relax about whether we do any actual reading or not. Playing games, drawing pictures, which is what I have actually been doing with them a lot of the time, and generally establishing a relationship, is quite sufficient to start with. I am tempted to scoff and am sure that some of the readers of this may scoff, but then I think, these people do know their thing, and have had a lot of experience at it. I shall be guided by their guidance, and will relax about us having to do reading every time. I may even read them the bit in the manual where it says we don't have to do any reading. This may amuse them, and get them thinking about the uses of reading.
Next time, I will try dressing down to my usual standard, and see what difference that makes. If they refuse to do any reading, what with me so dressed down, I now know that this doesn't matter.
GEM has been mentioned here before, although I think I called it Gems before, which is surely wrong. Anyway, now here's a BBC report about their expansion in England:
The largest chain of private schools in England has bought into the state sector for the first time.Gems – or Global Education Management Systems - has taken over a group set up to turn around failing state schools.
It recently took over a chain of independent schools, offering what it calls a cheaper, "no-frills" approach to private education at its 13 schools in England.
The company, set up by a Dubai millionaire, has 50 schools worldwide.
It is taking over a non-profit company called 3E's which was the first private firm to be awarded a contract to open and manage a state school.
3E's was brought in to set up Bexley Business Academy in Kent and has a 10-year contract from Surrey Council to run two schools in the county.
It was originally set up as a subsidiary of the successful and oversubscribed Kingshurst City Technology College, Solihull.
A new profit-making company, 3E-Gems Ltd, has been set up to take over 3E's' existing work and bid for other contracts in the state sector.
A trust is being set up to put some of the profits back into the education sector, it says.
Any mixture of state and private sector activity can go awfully wrong, with the private sector only making the state more efficient at churning out the wrong things. Nevertheless … interesting.
And that may be your lot for today. Today it is a Paradise Primary again (before which I have many other things to attend to), and after that I will be socialising. Don't you just hate it when you have a life? It gets in the way of blogging something terrible.
Francis Gilbert, a here at BEdBlog, has this to say about Charles Clarke's latest policy initiative: Lancel Hendricks.
Gilbert writes so well that it is hard to pick out any few key paragraphs. They're all key paragraphs. The gyst of this Telegraph piece is that Mr Clarke's new policy says that schools must include badly behaved boys like Lancel Hendricks, no matter how badly they behave. But Gilbert taught Lancel Hendricks and knows from experience that forcing Gilbert to teach Lancel Hendricks was a recipe for disaster for all the other pupils in Gilbert's class.
Solid evidence of whether or not educational standards are actually declining is hard to come by. Here is some though:
The John Barras chain of public houses is installing calculators beside its darts boards. Declining standards in mathematics have left younger players unable to do the sums, the chain claims.
This is quoted by Giles Smith, at the top of an article about "darts education". (Gratuitous darts board picture there, drawn on maths type paper!) Smith then cracks a lot of jokes which I quickly got bored with. I preferred the other quote he stuck at the top, from darts champion Phil "The Power" Taylor:
Darts is fantastic for honing your maths skills. They should introduce darts calculations into the GCSE maths syllabus.
… although, like so many, Phil "The Power" Taylor jumps from "X might be a good idea", to "X should therefore be compulsory". But this habit is an educational defect shared by many more persons than Phil "The Power" Taylor.
